Site and Place

Studies have shown that different ‘geographical sites’ (mountains, rivers, houses, fields …) are culturally loaded with a system of significant, symbolic weight which transforms them into ‘places’. Furthermore, people living within certain cultural contexts acquire their feelings about a space through social systems of socialisation; that is, place identification. Thus, in formal and non-formal educational systems, emphasis is placed on younger ages, when personal identification develops, for the teaching of subjects such as Geography and Homeland studies. These involve ideological messages regarding space.

Charging geographical sites with cultural significance is one of the well-known processes of establishing a collective memory, in which historical events important for the narrative of national restoration are linked to specific sites. Such sites may be of different sizes, beginning with those as small as a room (e.g., the study of Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish state), and proceeding to monuments such as statues, trees, gardens or cemeteries and even entire territories of a country. The transformation of a geographical site into a place of cultural significance follows diverse paths, influenced by events and the role of such a space in the national consciousness. At times these processes of constructing place identification are prolonged and stychic (unplanned) from a historical point of view; in other cases they are relatively rapid, and they planned by interested elements exercising social control. These elements are capable of utilising the building of places for practical or symbolic purposes which are important for their survival as organisations and for the continuation of their hegemony over the socio-cultural system.

Apart from the these cases, which are characteristically ideological, social and cultural processes, another system exists that transforms ‘sites’ into ‘places’; this is the economic system. In a consumer society space has economic significance, expressed in the prices of land and real estate. Organisations that profit from the sale of the space, such as settlement or building companies, apply mechanisms to influence the demand for sites: the higher the demand, the larger their gains. In these economic systems the accepted terminology is the ‘marketing’ or ‘selling’ of the sites, aided by high-powered advertising to create the desired demand.